Could Your Business Survive The Loss Of All Your Email Subscribers? Here’s How To Keep Your Email Marketing Lists Safe
Imagine logging in to your email marketing account one day to find it’s been hacked.
Or worse… accidentally deleting ALL your subscribers yourself.
You reach out to your email marketing provider in a panic, only to be told in no uncertain terms… it is not fixable unless you have your own backup.
It sounds like the kind of boogeyman story that email marketers would tell their kids, but it was the reality for Chanie Hyde, who accidentally deleted 40,000 subscribers from her list.
As she says in her own words…
As I watched the contact numbers slowly drop away by the 1000s towards zero, I started to panic. The blood drained from my face and an icy grip of fear tightened my chest. I uttered the stricken words “no, NO NOOO” over and over.
It turns out, that the action I had taken was not fixable. MailChimp had indeed queued all contacts for permanent deletion.
I started to consider when the last time I updated my CV was.
But wait, I hear you say…
Don’t the email marketing providers have backups?
Well, the truth is, yes they do.
But here’s why…
Your email marketing provider’s backups can’t save you
The backups your provider makes are designed for “disaster recovery”.
What that means is – in the event of a catastrophe – they can grab the latest good backup and spin up a new copy of their entire email marketing platform.
But here’s the problem:
These backups can quickly recover their entire system in one go… but they can’t restore individual user accounts or segments of account data.
As contemporary art gallery, Diego Diez, found out recently…
This isn’t just the case for MailChimp by the way.
This applies to all the email marketing platforms
In fact, this applies to ALL software-as-a-service platforms, including appointment and accounting systems, CRMs, online course platforms, eCommerce stores and more.
It doesn’t matter whether your email marketing provider uses “the cloud” or not.
If there isn’t an option to “undo” the action, the data is changed forever EVERYWHERE.
So if you trash your email list by deleting the wrong segment …
Or you upload the wrong CSV file…
Or you misconfigure an app integration or automation…
You’re on your own
And it’s far more likely you’ll lose subscribers for those reasons than it is for your email marketing provider’s servers to get wiped out in a storm.
Fact is, mistakes happen.
Account hacks happen.
Disgruntled employees happen.
Automation and 3rd party software glitches happen.
And if you don’t have your own backups, it’s game over
Blogging service, JournalSpace found this out the hard way in 2009.
A disgruntled employee wiped all their data…
And without a backup, they were dead in the water.
Backup Your Email List With ListLockr
ListLockr makes secure subscriber backups automatically every day so you’ll always have a fresh backup to hand if ever you need it
Look, even if your particular email marketing provider provides some kind of ‘undo’ safety net or backup and recovery feature, you still need to keep your own backups.
That’s because, as the old saying goes…
“Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket“
Fact is, nobody cares about your business as much as you do.
Not even your email marketing provider.
The most important thing to them is email deliverability.
It’s the ‘golden goose’ they must protect at all costs.
All it takes is
- a badly received email to put you on the wrong side of policy…
- a rogue affiliate who gets your website blacklisted for spam…
- a targeted campaign by unscrupulous competitors to raise your complaint rate…
- a blog broadcast that forwards spam to your email lists
- or just a period of poor list hygiene.
And boom…
Your email marketing account could be shut down
If that happens, it could take weeks to get your list back (if at all).
You don’t have to be a conspiracy-theorist or white nationalist to get booted from your email marketing provider either.
Regular, hardworking men and women who are running legitimate businesses, serving their audiences and providing for their families, get booted too.
Blogger, Tim Denning, was banned for life for an unspecified policy breach after sharing a friend’s Medium article with his list of around 50,000 subscribers.
Entrepreneur, Ryan Guina, lost several thousand dollars in revenue when his list of 30,000 subscribers was cut off without notice in the middle of his biggest marketing event of the year.
The reason – his spam complaint rate had crept too high.
So let’s imagine all the subscribers you’ve spent time and money building a relationship with suddenly vanished…
Have you got a FRESH backup?
If you’re like me… the answer is “probably not”.
It’s such a hassle remembering to login and export your lists, isn’t it?
Like me, you probably started out with good intentions, but with so many other things to take care of, enthusiasm fizzled out fast.
And pretty soon, the last backup you have is weeks or months old.
Thing is…
Old email list backups are a huge risk to your business
If you use an old backup, it’s going to get you in all kinds of trouble.
At best, you might just annoy people who unsubscribed since you made the export.
That might lead to spam complaints and lower engagement, killing your deliverability.
At worst, you might hit a recycled spam trap and find yourself blacklisted. That’s when an abandoned email address is recycled into a spam trap by the provider… which can happen in as little as 30-90 days.
Either way, that’s the fast track to getting your account permanently shut down.
Protect Your Email List With ListLockr
ListLockr makes secure subscriber backups automatically every day so you’ll always have a fresh backup to hand if ever you need it
You need to store and rotate your old backups carefully too.
That’s because they contain people’s personal data… their name, email address and so on.
Which means your backups need to be compliant with privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA.
If they are not, then every CSV export file you have on your computer or cloud drive is…
A lawsuit waiting to happen
Especially if you aren’t carefully encrypting your export files before storing them.
All it takes is for one of your cloud drive connected devices to get lost or stolen, and your subscribers personal data could easily fall into the wrong hands.
A data breach will not only destroy all trust in your business, it can also result in a business-crippling fine… or expensive lawsuits from angry customers whose personal information got leaked on your watch.
That’s why I created ListLockr
It protects your email list by making a secure, encrypted backup of your key subscriber data.
Automatically… Every. Single. Day.
You just set it up once and it’s done.
You don’t have to think about it… or “do” anything.
The service encrypts all subscriber personal data, and enforces a maximum 30 day rolling data retention period… making it 100% compliant with GDPR and other privacy laws.
For added security, we don’t allow backups to be directly downloaded from your account. Not even by us. Instead, when you request a download, a special time-limited link is emailed directly to the account holder.
We’ll also send you weekly backup summaries and give you advanced warning as you start to outgrow your plan, giving you time to upgrade when the time is right for you.
I should probably wax on about ListLockr’s features, but the bottom line is
ListLockr can protect thousands of subscribers for less than it costs to replace one of them
Let’s do some quick math using industry averages.
At $0.50 cost-per-click to a landing page with a 10% opt-in rate, that’s $5 per opt-in.
But not all opt-ins are equal.
Once you weed out the fake, mistyped and unconfirmed emails, and factor in 20% average email open rates, your cost per responsive subscriber is nearer $25.
So, replacing 1,000 responsive subscribers could cost you around $25,000
Let that sink in for a moment.
ListLockr can protect 5,000 subscribers for just 3 dollars a month.
That’s less than the price of a Starbucks Latte.
And the more subscribers you have, the cheaper it gets.
You can see why our customers say it’s…
“A no-brainer insurance policy for your email lists“
ListLockr is compatible with the following Email Marketing Providers:
Our flexible plans are suitable for both large and small lists, protecting your list as you grow.
What’s more, you can enjoy complete protection from day one secure in the knowledge you are protected by our triple guarantee, which means:
- No Risk – You get an unconditional 30 day money back guarantee
- Price Lock – no sneaky price rises, your active subscription pricing is set in stone
- Customer Support – when you need it most, we are here for you
So take ListLockr for a spin and give your lists the backup protection they deserve…
Yours sincerely,
Rob Woodgate
Founder of ListLockr
Ps – If you use some other provider, don’t panic. We’ll be integrating with more providers as time goes on, so simply click here and I’ll let you know when your provider is supported.